There are for me two pertinent points about Jordi Cruz’s cuisine. Firstly, he does something memorable with top quality Catalan ingredients. As with the brilliant one-ingredient kokotxas dish at Mugaritz, I found the dish Chef Jordi Cruz made of the Catalan leek calçot absolutely stunning; and the lorito (pearly razorfish) very good. As a food tourist, I dislike restaurants which carry no signature of the region around them, as if they were trying to escape their surroundings, as if they were exiles in their own land. A really good restaurant should push the boundaries of what can be done with local ingredients. Perhaps that is why on this Spanish trip, I liked Mugaritz, Azurmendi, and ABaC more than Arzak and Akelarre. In the midst of modernist anarchy (the rule it seems in Spanish 2*’s and 3*’s) one needs these dishes to remind oneself that one actually is in Spain.

Secondly, he is of that modernist-style of ingredient assemblage, which both rebels against the nouvelle-cuisine idea of purity of taste, and as an extension of that culinary philosophy, a loose fluid plating style. “Nothing is true and everything is permitted”, at least when choosing ingredients for a dish. Chefs experiment, and diners pay for the privilege of trying the most successful of their experiments. Here at ABaC I encountered a cosmopolitan bunch – Momofuku Ko’s shaved foie, the intense savory candy of anago sauce etc. Among the novel compositions, a two part foie dish (foie with mole ice cream, foccaccia + pigeon tea + shaved foie) and a flavorful onion soup paired with spherified gruyere dumplings, were the most successful. Chef Jordi Cruz is one of the most talented chefs in this experimental style. His instincts tend toward bold flavors (there were no quiet meditative dishes, unlike Mugaritz), but the compositional instinct is true. My impression of ABaC is of a meal super-saturated with taste and colour -maximal maximalism.

If anything, that is the one thing that I feel could be improved at ABaC. My impression is that Chef Jordi is a flavor maximalist, with the flavor profile tuned to 11 on all dishes. Chef Jordi could yet vary the intensity of flavor in his cooking and deliver a few quieter dishes, in order to deliver a meal that is more than the sum of his flavorful hits, and has its own logical development. The art of listening to a full album may be a forgotten one in these days of Spotify, but the truth that a great album is never just an album of hits continues to apply. But it is a minor point. Overall, ABaC provides a very strong two-star standard meal.

Nitro bloody mary (4.25/5)

vodka, tomato juice, salt, pepper, mixed with liquid nitrogen to form a granite

paired with slices of cherry and begonia flower petals

a good savory start to the meal

the dark bread was crunchy and delicious (5/5) but the olive brioche was a bit cardboard-y (3.5/5), with some flour-y tastes inside

A dish in two parts. First, a crunchy foccaccia slice with shaved frozen foie gras, with pigeon tea. (5/5) This was a fantastic adaptation of the Momofuku Ko technique of prepping foie. The warm pigeon tea, a consomme, helped to cut the richness of the foie even further. (The shaving already helps by introducing a aerated, fluffy texture to the foie)

Second, a foie butter, with corn powder and Mexican mole ice cream (5/5). I remember being hugely impressed by the mole ice cream.

it tasted like its description – a salty anago (salt-water eel) burger.

full of intense sweet-salty flavor, the fried brioche and aioli was a guilty pleasure.

Young leeks roasted with coconut ice cream (5/5)

genius. barbecued calçots, a kind of Catalan sweet leek, was well paired with balsamic vinegar and coconut ice cream. it seems so simple, but the combination of sweet sourness from the balsamic vinegar, richness from the coconut ice cream really highlighted the mild sweetness of the calçots, which had none of the pungency of leek. simplicity itself, and an apparent variation on the Catalan tradition of calçotada (calçot BBQ)

the miso-aubergine water tasted of a pleasant savoriness, like soy sauce

“Sea and Rock” Pearly Razor (4.5/5)

The rare Lorito AKA Razorfish AKA Raor (xyrichtys novacula). Fried fish with seaweed foam and aioli. This was an impeccably cooked piece of whitefish, with a clean meaty taste. The bones and scales were fried and edible as well.

The filet mignon cut of Iberico pork, foie (with spongy texture) with a good sear, charcoal-ed bread; with rice foam. A coming together of very flavorful ingredients, the iberico had a profound flavor. This was a pleasing duet of dishes, the clean taste of white fish segueing into the rich tastes of iberico pork, dabbed with some more foie (a favorite ingredient of the chef). I came to appreciate here two features of Chef Jordi Cruz’s cuisine:

Firstly, his cuisine is not a sauce-driven one. Rather, it is driven by the high quality Spanish and Catalan ingredients available to him. Calçots, iberico pork, Lorito, Palamós prawns are clearly meant to drive their respective dishes.

Secondly, his style of cooking is a series of compositions that takes those ingredients as starting points; no ingredient is too sacred to be blended into a pop-culture mixer. Even with top-quality ingredients, he does not hesitate to pair them with bold flavors. Not for this chef the nouvelle-cuisine emphasis on how the ingredient tastes. He does not hesitate to put anago into a fried Chinese bun, or Gillardeau oyster with veal soup. When it succeeds, the result is genius – such as the calçots with balsamic vinegar and coconut ice cream. It is a style of cooking with no reference points except the Chef’s imagination. It must be what Arzak once was.

I’ve been using my iPad a lot in the past year (you can see it in many of my restaurant visits), mainly using the Kindle app to read books (stranded from Amazon 2-day delivery, the immediacy of access to a Kindle book is currently an acceptable trade-off for the lack of a physical book). But this month, I’ve been trying some of the iPad games, and I’ve been really impressed by Slay and Monument Valley. (Another honorable mention: Hitman GO)

MONUMENT VALLEY

Monument Valley, a beautiful iOS piece of art masquerading as a game, released some paid DLC this weekend. I happily paid the $1.99 for the extra content of Monument Valley (though it apparently created some bad ratings for the game on the iOS app store). It surprises me that anyone would complain about the cost, because the hour of beautiful visuals that Ustwo has created is stunning. Innovative gimmicks like the twisting serpentine pillars (appendix world 2), the Escherian ending of the halcyon world (appendix world 5), and the perspective shifting world of deceit (appendix world 6) are all mind-expanding additions to the stable of impossible geometries in Monument Valley. The meditativeness reminds me of the casual game Knytt (a casual game I played about 5-6 years ago), but is way more lush.

UX Design note: I also like the not-too-responsive button in the world select, where I can press the button once, and before it fades to black (to the world), I can press the world select button again. That UX gives me a sense that the world moves at its own pace.

Game Design note: I also really like that there is no need for a reset button. That to me signifies thoughtful level design.

Monument Valley is not really a game in the sense of skill. It is a completely linear journey through a beautiful piece of art. The challenge comes from figuring out the right method of manipulating the levers and cranks on the level. But I love the world of impossible geometries it portrays.

SLAY

Slay is one of the most addictive games I have played. I first played it on a friend’s Palm in 2003, constantly playing it. Then I re-encountered it in 2006-7, playing the Windows version on my Desktop. I even created a few maps for the game. I recently re-discovered the game on iOS, and have been whiling my hours away conquering imaginary islands.

For the uninitiated, Slay is a game where you are set on a single island with 5 other players, and have to conquer the entire island and make them your colour. The territory is hexagonal in nature, and you have various units (peasants, spearmen, knights, barons) that can conquer various structures (houses and castles). The basic rules are here: http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/slayRules.html

The geometrically increasing food costs of the units (peasants = 2, spearmen = 6, knights = 18, barons = 54)keeps it a brutal game, one of sudden cut and thrust. Over extend yourself, and a winning position is quickly turned into a losing one.

What is truly impressive is that Slay is the work of one Sean O’Connor, who wrote it for the Atari ST all the way back in 1989 (!) I have not seen a website detailing the Slay strategies I’ve figured out (or is that re-figured out?), so here are a handful of tips from my most recent deep-dive into Slay (on highest difficulty):

Your units protect your land. So it is not always necessary to use your peasants (1st level) to find new land. Sometimes, the best use of a new unit is to protect a tenuous piece of land you already own. In the quest for the new, we risk losing the old.

You don’t have to be protect every square of land you have from potential cut-off. It makes you too conservative, and the AI will grow at a faster rate than you. On the highest difficulty, the AI will make every effort to link two pieces of land (e.g. Brown) on either side of your land bridge (Light Green), in a pincer movement to establish a connection between his territories

BBB GG BBB —> BBB BB BBB.

But if there are two colours (say Brown and Yellow), it may not be necessary to protect the land bridge. That is a calculated risk one must take – and assume that the opponents (AI or human) are not malicious.

BBB GG YYY —> BBB GG YYY

These unguarded risks are some of the most exciting parts of Slay. If the same player is on either side of your unguarded territory, it is 100% that he will try to take it, so guard it. But if different players are on either side of unguarded territory, it is quite likely that the territory will go unmolested.

If you fail at a map, try and try again, to see the recurring patterns. Is Brown dominating lower right, and then overwhelming you quickly at upper left and lower left? (the situation on the map Rouft, also the win I was most proud of). Then put a castle on lower right, playing a delaying action so that the (inevitable) extinction of your territory lower right requires Brown to use his knight (3rd level) and that slows Brown down enough to link the two territories on the left side before Brown comes like a tidal wave.

My favorite part of Slay is game-changing “conga line”, a strategy viable in the last third of the game, where one can churn out 3-5 new peasants per turn. In that phase, the fun part of dividing the opponent’s (there is usually only one in the end-game) territory begins, since the peasants can come out of your territory like a cheap snake and bisect/trisect/quadra-sect the opponent’s territory. Since upkeep for the biggest units increase geometrically, I much prefer using an endless rush of small units to kill the opponent’s big units (knights and barons) by partitioning territory so that they starve to death, rather than killing their big-units by creating an expensive white elephant (e.g. baron vs knight). Example: I used the conga line to defeat an opponent who already had control of the center in Rouft, by getting behind the lines of his big units. The downside of this method is that the many deaths create a thicket of trees, but you will have the little units to chop them down. At the end of that game on Rouft, the entire island was full of trees.

Sprinkle in large units as Knights to maximise your chances of keeping your little men alive.

1-3-1-1-3-1.

In this way, you can go 6-deep into an opponent’s territory. (Replace with spearmen/barons as appropriate)

Notice your line can only be killed by barons (4th level), or by cutting off this expensive line at the root.

Use castles to maintain your hold on the conga-line. Peasants and castles are your best friend. It is analogous to a tower rush in Warcraft 3.

Keep castles on the side of territories with (significantly) less than 18 hexes. This is so they can’t sustain a knight to knock it down.

In the early game, link your territories as fast as is feasible, while making sure your territories are protected.

UNRESOLVED QUESTIONS

Your hut will protect adjacent hexes in early game, but so will other opponents’ huts. I haven’t figured out if it is better to first take hexes that next to my hut AND an opponent’s hut, or to boldly link up hexes a bit further away from my hut.

One possible point of improvement in my game is better consideration of the opponent’s situation. There are 6 players on any map. I usually err on the side of defensive caution in the first third, only turning heavily offensive in the last third of the game. But perhaps a better consideration of the opponent’s circumstances will allow me to take more risks in the first third of the game. So far the only systematic criterion I’ve come up to take better early-game risks is what I detail in tip 2, which is to assume non-malice when there are two different players on either side of my tenuous territory.

Many of the dishes will have mushrooms or truffles of some sort. The signature mushroom ketchup sauce (made from repeated straining a grab bag of mushrooms) is especially great.

There will be at least one vegetable garden dish (as a homage to his period in Michel Bras’s kitchen)

Even with the exalted view of Singapore from the 70th floor of the Swissotel, the cooking remains humble in two important ways. Firstly, the chef is not overwhelmed by the luxury ingredients, and he does not hesitate to make sunchokes and beetroot two of the star dishes of his ten-course tasting menu. Secondly, the chef does not warp ingredients with molecular techniques beyond all recognition, his ingredients preserve their natural shape while being cooked.

The Choconuts dessert has surely reached a pinnacle of perfection. It is one of the best chocolate desserts I can remember having.

What I feel can be improved at JAAN:

I felt that my meal this time round could have had better composed dishes. While the individual ingredients were impeccably cooked, the sum was sometimes just equal to the parts. As an example, my last main, the Toriyama beef, was paired with tremendously good Hokkaido creamed corn and grilled corn, but a greasy cornbread somewhat detracted from the clean fat of the beef. Similarly, the amuse of black sesame sponge and smoked eel made little sense to me, and the first main, a “supergroup” of Hokkaido sea urchin, obsiblue prawn, and caviar was neither really synergistic nor intellectually stimulating (I had the same reaction to a very similar dish at Amber in Hong Kong earlier this year – I just felt that luxury ingredients were their own raison d’etre for the dish, and it was on the menu more as to signify luxury than for intrinsic merit)

The dessert program should become more comprehensive. In a sequence of three desserts, having two of them as sorbets (and very run-of-the-mill sorbets at that) is disappointing.

The bread program can also be improved, the best parts of the breads were the charmingly pointed baguette ends (curled up like leprechaun shoes), but the rest of the breads were slightly humdrum.

For refined, well-executed cuisine, JAAN is the first restaurant that comes to my mind. It is easy to forget the Chef Julien is still very young. I wonder how the cuisine at JAAN will develop in the next year or two.

Rating: 17.5/20

Lentil Hummus, cereals tuile

Black sesame sponge, smoked eel (3.5/5)

I didn’t understand this amuse, and why black sesame goes with smoked eel. The flavors were separate, even the form – solid sponge with solid eel, one after the other – maintained separateness

Parmesan tart, tomato fondue

Cantal and walnut crackers

Mushroom tea, cep sabayon (4.5/5)

A very good amuse, a Julien Royer standard. The earthiness from the mushrooms paired as well as ever with the light yet substantial savory egg-foam sabayon. What elevated it (I cannot remember if this is a new touch since my last meal last year) was the toasted buckwheat on top of the sabayon. When the mushroom tea is poured in, the toasted buckwheat maintained its crunchiness, providing a crunchy texture. But it also gave a taste of Christmas to the tea. It is hard to describe the taste of buckwheat, but it is as impactful as nutmeg.

HOKKAIDO SEA URCHIN Obsiblue prawn, Kaluga queen caviar (4.25/5)

Seaweed butter, burnt toast. The obsiblue prawn was made into a jelly this time (did you know? Obsiblue prawn is available all year round).

This was a dish delicious by virtue of its ingredients, but it had little synergy. The mild burst of marine taste from the urchin and obsiblue prawn jelly was over in one or two bites.

Reminiscent of the 2* Amber’s signature dish: “Hokkaido sea urchin in lobster jelly, with cauliflower, caviar, and crispy seaweed”. A popular confection – sea urchin, crustacean jelly and caviar. But while this trio of ingredients may feel decadent by virtue of its ingredients, I don’t quite taste the synergy.

The idea of this dish also seems an unwieldly mashup on two ideas: the refined little supergroup of luxury ingredients in a single bowl (e.g. found at Amber), and the sea urchin – black toast combination(e.g. found at Jean-Georges). I was a bit confused as to whether to eat the dish with a spoon or by using my burnt toast as a dip.

BEETROOT ‘COLLECTION’ Burrata artigiana, honeycombs, radish (4.25/5)

I especially liked the beetroot sorbet, something which captured the earthy simplicity of beetroot, available to any chef.

The scattered bits of honeycomb added marvellous texture and taste to the dish.

WILD ABALONE Grenobloise (3.75/5)

Baby abalone, burgundy truffle, mushroom ketchup.

The baby abalone was quite tough. The best part was the mushroom ketchup (a signature sauce here, straining different mushrooms)

It remained separate. Burgundy truffle only imparts a mild truffle taste to the dish.

Grenobloise (a parsley-brown butter) sauce is listed on the menu, but I have little impression of it.

Very well done crispy scales on the Amadai, (the scales needs first to be scrubbed to face up, and then fried without touching the flesh of the fish). The purple hanaho flower (from the shiso plant) gave a fresh taste to the dish. The miso caramel was delicious

While the wagyu was perfectly cooked, and full of clean beef flavor, unfortunately the cornbread, which was greasy and undisciplined, detracted from the clean oiliness of the wagyu. I had to set aside the cornbread to focus on tastes of the wagyu.

But the creamed corn, and the roasted corn, were full of clean corn flavor. The pickled onionwas an inspired touch.

KYOHO GRAPE Elderflower, lemon, granite

Elderflower pearls, lemon granite

CHOCONUTS ‘TART’ Taste and textures (5/5)

I was very pleased with this dessert. Chocolate in multiple forms: a perfectly formed quenelle of chocolate ice-cream (puzzlingly described to me by the Front-of-House as a “sorbet”), with chocolate foam, chocolate balls, chocolate tuile, on a chocolate tart, with a huge dollop of hot chocolate cream being applied as the coup-de-grace.

Marvelous and classic chocolate dessert, one of the very best I have tried anywhere in the world. Decadent, delicious, and (very quickly) disappeared.

CUCUMBER Mint, milk (3.5/5)

Cucumber sorbet, apple granite, mint, milk meringue on top.

Desserts seem to be a weaker program here at JAAN. Of the 3 dessert courses, only one was a real dessert (as opposed to sorbets, which can be slapped together with very little thought). I hope the kitchen will step up their game on dessert offerings in general. While the Choconuts tart was excellent, a restaurant of this calibre should really have two proper desserts on a 10 course menu.